Saturday, April 2, 2016

Interview with Kara Thomas, author of The Darkest Corners

Interview with AuthorKara Thomas

As the reader, I often found The Darkest Corners unsettling (and, simultaneously, compulsively readable). Do you ever find yourself unsettled by the stories you create or by scenes you’re writing? Or is that sense of fear and discomfort displaced as you work towards building the structure and detail that creates the response the reader experiences?

I’m definitely unsettled by the themes in The Darkest Corners, and I think that’s why I write them. I was always a nervous person who thought a lot about worst-case scenarios: as a kid, I would triple-check the lock on the front door before I went to bed. Writing about the worst things that could happen to a person is how I deal with the fear, I guess. I still get nervous when I take a taxi alone at night. I’m not interested in writing lurid serial killer tales—I’m more interested in how human beings deal with unsettling things.

Tell me a little bit about your writing process: Do you outline? Start at the beginning? The middle? The end?

Lately I’ve realized that I have to outline—my plots tend to be overly complicated and ambitious in my head, so an outline is absolutely necessary to pare things down. I always start at the beginning—but I usually always know exactly how the end will play out on paper.

I happen to know that you watch many true crime documentaries. Which three would you recommend to those interested in exploring the genre?

Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane

I am going to give a bonus answer that you did not ask for, which is a list of my favorite true crime books:

People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry Lost Girls by Robert Kolker Under the Bridge by Rebecca Godfrey

My blog is dedicated to my personal hiding spot, books. Name a notable book that provided you with a hiding spot.

Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins is my go-to, escape from the world, feel warm and fuzzy read. And bonus: It reminds me of being in Paris!

What can readers look forward to next?

My next book, another mystery/thriller, will be out in 2017. I’m still working on it, but I can assure you that it will involve three girls, a small Wisconsin town in the dead of winter, a séance, and blood.

Kara is the author of THE
DARKEST CORNERS, coming April 2016 from Random House/Delacorte. She is
also the author of the Prep School Confidential series from St. Martin's
Griffin under the pen name Kara Taylor. Kara has written for Warner
Brothers Television and currently writes full-time on Long Island, where
she lives with her husband and rescue cat.

There are
ghosts around every corner in Fayette, Pennsylvania. Tessa left when she was
nine and has been trying ever since not to think about it after what happened
there that last summer. Memories of things so dark will burn themselves into
your mind if you let them.

Callie never left. She moved to another house, so she doesn’t have to walk
those same halls, but then Callie always was the stronger
one. She can handle staring into the faces of her demons—and if she parties
hard enough, maybe one day they’ll disappear for good.

Tessa and Callie have never talked about what they saw that night. After the
trial, Callie drifted and Tessa moved, and childhood friends just have a way of
losing touch.

But ever since she left, Tessa has had questions. Things have never quite added
up. And now she has to go back to Fayette—to Wyatt Stokes, sitting on death
row; to Lori Cawley, Callie’s dead cousin; and to the one other person who may
be hiding the truth.

Only the closer Tessa gets to the truth, the closer she gets to a killer—and
this time, it won’t be so easy to run away.